WAGNER
Bayreuth, Aug. 2d, 1891
It was at Nuremberg that we struck the inundation of music-mad strangers
that was rolling down upon Bayreuth. It had been long since we had seen
such multitudes of excited and struggling people. It took a good
half-hour to pack them and pair them into the train--and it was the
longest train we have yet seen in Europe. Nuremberg had been witnessing
this sort of experience a couple of times a day for about two weeks. It
gives one an impressive sense of the magnitude of this biennial
pilgrimage. For a pilgrimage is what it is. The devotees come from the
very ends of the earth to worship their prophet in his own Kaaba in his
own Mecca.
If you are living in New York or San Francisco or Chicago or anywhere
else in America, and you conclude, by the middle of May, that you would
like to attend the Bayreuth opera two months and a half later, you must
use the cable and get about it immediately or you will get no seats, and
you must cable for lodgings, too. Then if you are lucky you will get
seats in the last row and lodgings in the fringe of the town. If you
stop to write you will get nothing. There were plenty of people in
Nuremberg when we passed through who had come on pilgrimage without first
securing seats and lodgings. They had found neither in Bayreuth; they
had walked Bayreuth streets a while in sorrow, then had gone to Nuremberg
and found neither beds nor standing room, and had walked those quaint
streets all night, waiting for the hotels to open and empty their guests
into trains, and so make room for these, their defeated brethren and
sisters in the faith.
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